Homemade Love
by J. California Cooper |
Gorilla, My Love
by Toni Cade Bambara |
A Dove of the East
by Mark Helprin |
Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime
by J. California Cooper | 
White People
by Allan Gurganus | 
Eight Men
by Richard Wright | 
Last Tales
by Isak Dinesen | 
Lost in the City
by Edward P. Jones | 
Drunk with Love
by Ellen Gilchrist | 
Don't Tell Anyone
by Frederick Busch |
Platte River
by Rick Bass | 
A Quiver Full of Arrows
by Jeffrey Archer | 
Under a Glass Bell
by Anais Nin |
The Ragman's Daughter
by Alan Sillitoe | 
The Ways of White Folks
by Langston Hughes | 
Another Country
by James Baldwin | 
The Women of Brewster Place
by Gloria Naylor | 
If Beale Street Could Talk
by James Baldwin | 
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
by James Baldwin | 
Flying Home and Other Stories
by Ralph Ellison |
"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob. By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.